Speaker of the House Mike Johnson blames Democrats for the Jeffrey Epstein situation during a news conference at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, July 22, 2025. AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
On Tuesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson, in a departure from his previous calls for transparency, announced that he would not ask for a vote on whether the files pertaining to accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein should be released. Only a week before, on the right-wing podcast “The Benny Show,” he had said, “It’s a very delicate subject, but we should put everything out there and let the people decide it.” This week, he changed his tune, and at a press conference, he said, “We need the administration to have the space to do what it is doing.” He allowed that should there be a “neccesary or appropriate” need for further congressional action, he would look at it. But then said emphatically, “I don’t think we’re at that point yet, because we agree with the president.”
It’s impossible to truly know what prompted Johnson’s about-face, but it’s worth noting that he has long been connected to the New Apostolic Reformation, a charismatic evangelical movement that teaches that Christians are called to take “dominion” over all aspects of society, including the government. Johnson has publicly acknowledged that NAR has had a “profound influence” on his life, according to a report issued by the Congressional Freethought Caucus last year.
It’s also worth noting that arguably the most influential and visible NAR leader, a Texas business strategist named Lance Wallnau, has been outspoken in recent weeks in his defense of Trump on the Epstein issue. On July 14, Wallnau told his 100,000 YouTube followers that he believed that Trump was acting in the best interest of the country by not releasing the files. Wallnau’s line of reasoning began with his suggestion that both the assassination of JFK and the assassination attempt on Trump last year in Butler, Pennsylvania, were inside jobs. He went on to describe Trump’s critics on the left as “demonic” people who “smell disunity” in MAGA and are using the infighting as an opportunity to tarnish Trump’s reputation. “I think they would be willing to plant information and evidence and create false trails, all kinds of booby traps,” he said.
Among Wallnau’s followers are some powerful people. As I reported last year, Wallnau has forged strong connections with GOP leaders—for example, he hosted a Pennsylvania campaign event for JD Vance last September. He also helped develop Project 19, a right-wing political initiative to win 19 key counties in swing states for Trump. Wallnau has called Kamala Harris a “Jezebel” and speculated that people on the political left may be controlled by demons.
Another prominent Christian nationalist influencer, Texas pastor Joel Webbon, has also arrived at a belief in Trump’s innocence—but from a different perspective. Webbon isn’t connected with the NAR like Johnson and Wallnau—instead, he’s a member of the TheoBros, a network of Christian nationalist millennial influencers. Many of them believe that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, and that the Ten Commandments should replace the US Constitution. Like NAR, the TheoBros are also well-connected to Republican politicians. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth attends a TheoBros-aligned church, and Vance has socialized with members of the movement, as well.
Last week, Webbon devoted an episode of his YouTube show, which has 123,000 followers, to the Epstein files. His guest was Scott Horton, a libertarian podcaster and staunch critic of the left-wing government “deep state” that Trump has consistently blamed for all of America’s ills. In the episode, Horton asserted that he didn’t believe that Trump would be implicated in the Epstein files. Moreover, he argued that Epstein was a foreign asset, likely working with the Israeli national intelligence agency Mossad to entrap Trump.
He’s not alone in believing this particular conspiracy theory; it was also put forth by right-wing broadcaster Tucker Carlson, who also hosted Horton on his show. “This isn’t just like, ‘oh my goodness, maybe we had somebody working with Israeli intelligence that was blackmailing politicians here in America,’” said Webbon. “The reality is that [US-Israeli relations have] been a toxic relationship stretching back decades.” He added, “This is becoming a massive problem that people are noticing, as the kids say.” The latter was an allusion to the antisemitic trope of “noticing,” a phrase that refers to people taking note of the fact that a powerful person is Jewish.
A link between Epstein, who was Jewish, and Mossad fed neatly into Webbon’s preexisting biases. He has routinely expressed antisemitic views on social media. Last November, he posted on X, “I hate Judaism but love Jews and wish them a very pleasant conversion to Christianity.” In a podcast episode, he called Judaism a “parasitical” religion. “What it has done historically throughout the ages is typically go into other countries, other peoples with other religions, and kind of cozy up but not really for their benefit—not a mutually beneficial relationship, but where they ultimately get far more out of the deal than the Christian nation does.” In an email to Mother Jones last year, Webbon said he stands by “everything I’ve said about Judaism. It is a pernicious evil.”
Meanwhile, some other evangelicals—though not Trump supporters— are pushing for the administration to release the files. Last week, Christianity Today editor-in-chief Russell Moore penned an op-ed in his magazine titled “Why We Want to See the Epstein Files.” The main reason was that “we want justice done,” he wrote. “We want to believe that our institutions—even in the present crises of credibility that most are going through—are not wholly corrupt.”